Back in June, we learned that WhatsApp was developing a Scam Alert feature, which Meta officially detailed over two weeks ago. While WhatsApp hasn’t yet revealed exactly when the Scam Alert feature will roll out to everyone, the public release shouldn’t be far off, as it’s now available to some Android users enrolled in WhatsApp’s beta program.
This revelation comes from the folks at WABetaInfo, who discovered this development on beta version 2.26.34.1 of WhatsApp for Android.
As the name suggests, Scam Alert will warn users if an incoming message from an unknown sender appears to be a scam, without the sender knowing the recipient is using Scam Alert.
When a WhatsApp user receives a Scam Alert warning, they can mark the sender as trusted or block and report them. If they mark the chat as trusted, they can also share the last five messages from that conversation with WhatsApp to help improve the feature’s accuracy.
However, to work, Scam Alert must be manually enabled in WhatsApp for Android’s Settings > Account menu, since the feature is optional.
In an official blog post, Meta described WhatsApp’s Scam Alert as “a new, optional feature that runs an on-device machine learning model to alert a user about potential scam messages.“
“No message content leaves the device for classification or is auto-reported to WhatsApp, Meta, or anyone else. The feature complements end-to-end encryption while enabling a user-controlled, optional scam alert when the model believes there’s a likely scam,” Meta further said.
You can read the complete post here to learn more about the Scam Alert feature.